External or portable Hard Drive

[DonPriebe]

... When recommending your solutions, are any of you actually testing the ability to reliably restore the drive you backed up or are you just trusting the product to be able to work as advertised when the time comes?

I don't recall if anyone has recommended Norton Save and Restore and/or Cobian backup, but I will report that they actually do work. I have Norton running a backup of my C: disk on a scheduled basis - a complete image once a month and incrementals thereafter. Cobian does a file level backup on my other disks, except those files and disks that I wouldn't mind losing or would be as easy to recreate as to restore.

My routine maintenance procedure is to clean up my computer once a month - delete unneeded files, clean out the TEMP folder, run a registry cleaner, install Windows (and other) updates, and defrag the disks. Twice recently this has left me with a computer that would not boot.[*] Norton saved me. I boot off the recovery CD and restore my C: drive to its state the night before.

Cobian has the ability to specify exactly which files you want to backup and which you want to exclude. It also can run a batch file before the scheduled backup and one afterward. I use this to be able to backup my client data which is on an encrypted logical disk that is normally not mounted.

[*] Extra credit - my computer is five years old but still hardware gutsy - 3.2GHz dual core CPU, 4 GB RAM, 250 GB HD plus 250 GB external, XP Pro. I suspect it is full of odds and ends of programs past. It takes forever to boot or open a browser. Should I ...

(a) Live with it.
(b) Reinstall XP Pro and all the application software
(c) Install Win 7 (64) Pro and hopefully reinstall the application software
(d) Buy a new computer with Win 7 Pro (64) and go from there.

[geekgirldany]

After my last hard drive failure I am not currently using a backup program. I manually backup my files each night. For me the OS and programs are pretty easy to reinstall. Time consuming but easy. It is when you go paperless and all those files are gone. That is what happened to me.

So now I have a BlacX Hard Drive dock from Thermalake. I just stick the drive in there. Copy my files from C to K drive. Do the backup of Drake tax and document manager. And I am done. Take about an 45 minutes to an hour to backup.

I am going to look into Acronis as a second protective measure. Looks like a good program.

[Koss]

Manual Backup

My office also uses a straightforward manual backup, for files only.

I've heard good things about Norton Ghost and also about Acronis. But we don't use either one. We don't back up to an external hard drive, either.

I manually back up files about once every two weeks or so to a different partition on the hard drive of one of our PCs. We're small enough that we don't need a server. Our office has two PCs that are networked.

I also periodically back up files to a USB flash drive. Yes, that is technically an external drive, but it's not the box that most people think of when they hear that term. The USB flash drive is taken off site after each backup.

Our "regular" hard drive, and the partition used for backup files, and the USB flash drive are all encrypted with AES-256 grade encryption.

If one of our two office PCs had a catastrophic failure, we could simply use the other one. Our "regular" hard drive that holds all the active files is stored on one PC, and they are networked to allow the other PC to have access to that drive. But the backup partition is on the other PC. So if one completely crashes, we always have the other PC, with the files, and all the same applications.

If the office itself suffered a catastrophic loss, and both PCs were toasted, we would have to use the flash drive. We would probably have to go out and buy a new PC to get back up and running.

The only mission critical applications we would need to install would be our tax software, our encryption software, MS Office, and QuickBooks. (Well, okay, there's printer/scanner drivers, antivirus, and all that sort of stuff. It sucks, and I hope we never have to do it. Like Dany said, it's time consuming, but it's not that hard.)

On our backup partition, we have backups from every two weeks going back about a year. So if we regret deleting a file, whether by accident or because we thought we wouldn't need it and now we do, even if we have performed a backup since the deletion, we can often recover it by going back to an earlier backup.

This process, which I perform manually, is sometimes referred to in the IT industry as "versioning." Sophisticated software like Acronis and Norton Ghost can be configured to do this automatically.

The backup of our files currently is between 1.5 GB and 2.0 GB, and it usually takes a half hour or so. The whole setup is not as complicated as it sounds, once you understand it, and once you get comfortable with it. But it works well because our office, and the amount of data involved, is relatively small.

Versioning is a double-edged sword. You may be keeping stuff you really don't want. Think subpoenas, discovery, etc.

BMK

[Davc]

My routine maintenance procedure is to clean up my computer once a month - delete unneeded files, clean out the TEMP folder, run a registry cleaner, install Windows (and other) updates, and defrag the disks. Twice recently this has left me with a computer that would not boot.

Probably the registry cleaner. They have a reputation for turning computers into paperweights.

[dtlee]

For anyone who has Windows 7, it might make sense to simply use the recovery tools innate with the operating system along with your optical drive and external drive. Here is a link to an recent article by a fairly well-respected technical author:

http://windowssecrets.com/links/of5d7t4ydcj4d/783c69h/